Half of babies now born outside marriage

Almost half of all babies are born outside marriage, offical figures have revealed.

The rate of 46 per cent for the first three months of this year is the highest ever for England and Wales.

The proportion of newborns with unmarried parents has risen by more than 50 per cent since 1991.

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe said: 'These figures are deeply depressing as people are regarding marriage as an optional extra to bringing up children rather than a quintessential foundation for a family.

'Marriage should be made more beneficial to parents by addressing it through the benefits and tax systems.'

The Office for National Statistics figures also show that women in their thirties continue to have the highest fertility rate.

In 2008, 708,708 babies were born in England and Wales, up from 690,013 the previous year.

Fertility rose among all age groups, but women in their early 30s continued to enjoy the highest rates, with 112.3 births per 1,000 women aged between 30 and 34.

Among women aged between 15 and 44 there were an average of 63.5 births per 1,000 women, a rise which marked a return to 1992 levels.

In England, women in the West Midlands had the most children - 2.09 per woman - and the lowest was the North East at 1.86.

Last month official population statistics showed that a baby boom is fuelling Britain's fastest population growth in half a century.

The number of people in the UK passed 61million for the first time, ONS figures revealed.

Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age.

This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 - up 33,000 on 2007. For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s.

The figures also show that net immigration - the balance of those arriving over those leaving - fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers.

There was a total of 61,383,000 people living in the UK in mid-2008. The figure has leapt by two million - equivalent to a city twice the size of Birmingham - in just seven years.

The increase of 408,000 in the 12 months from mid-2007 was the steepest since the baby boom years of the early 1960s.

It represented an annual increase of 0.7 per cent - more than twice as fast as in the 1990s and three times the rate of the 1980s.